The Dictator [2012]

THE DICTATOR

After his live-ammo situationist spoofs Borat and Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen has returned to straight fiction-features with his broad comedy satire The Dictator. This is not, repeat not, a cinephile homage to Chaplin's The Great Dictator. It is less edgy than Baron Cohen's previous two films, featuring big, conventionally contrived gags and a colossal central turn from the man himself. Baron Cohen's Dictator is set to make Peter Sellers's Inspector Clouseau a model of subtlety and sensitivity. The movie is in the fish-out-of-water tradition of Coming to America and many others. It doesn't, in truth, offer much of a twist on the genre. It does, however, deliver laughs and weapons-grade offensiveness.
Baron Cohen plays General Aladeen, the bizarre ruler of the oil-rich north African rogue state Wadiya: he is a satirical version of the Saddams and Gaddafis, those tinpot tyrants whose natural cruelty and vanity was nurtured by the west – maintained as allies to keep other states in line, or repurposed as bogeymen to be defeated when the need arose. A confrontation with Washington looms after the General announces Wadiya was just months away from enriching uranium, and corpses and giggles uncontrollably when trying to claim this was for "clean energy purposes".
An invasion threat from the US forces him to make a state visit to New York to explain himself to the UN, and like Borat before him, Aladeen finds himself stunned in various ways by the strange and exotic world of New York City hotels. Yet when a duplicitous relative, played by Ben Kingsley, turns out to have a treasonous plan in mind, the General finds himself anonymous and penniless on the Manhattan streets and becomes dependent on the charity of a feminist vegetarian cafe manager, played by Anna Faris, who comes to his rescue like Jamie Lee Curtis with Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places.
Subtle it isn't. The satirical content is lower than in Borat, apart from one Michael-Moore-ish speech in which Aladeen begs America to become a dictatorship. Basically this is a firework-display of bad taste, and I was often reminded of the cheerfully reprehensible Kentucky Fried Movie in the 70s, a film unashamedly low in nutritional value. But it was very funny, and so is this. The Dictator isn't going to win awards and it isn't as hip as Borat. Big, goofy, outrageous laughs are what it has to offer.